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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will head to Beijing later this month to participate in the annual trilateral meeting with Russia and China.

Ms. Swaraj, currently in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar for the ASEAN Regional Forum meet, will be meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on August 29th as part of the annual trilateral meet among the the three countries.

Ms. Swaraj’s participation in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), where she met with the Foreign Ministers of the regional forum, is her first in a multilateral event.

Among others, Ms. Swaraj met Mr. Wang Yi on Saturday.

She had met Mr. Yi in June—her first meeting with a foreign minister of another nation after the Narendra Modi government came to power.

“The two reviewed the movement of bilateral relations since then [June],” MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin said.

China on Saturday vowed “clear and firm reactions” to defend its interests in the South China Sea but rejected suggestions of aggression, as America’s top diplomat urged restraint from all claimants to the bitterly contested waters.

A series of incidents between Beijing and several other nations with territorial claims to the sea has sent tensions soaring across Southeast Asia and spurred Washington to call for a halt to any activities that could worsen regional maritime relations.

Animosity over the South China Sea, a crucial maritime route that is also believed to hold huge oil and gas deposits, is dominating Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) talks in Myanmar, which began on Friday and are broadening to include key world powers ahead of security discussions on Sunday.

“The position of China to safeguard its own sovereignty, maritime rights and interests is firm and unshakeable,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters following a meeting with Asean counterparts in the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw.

Beijing claims sovereignty over almost the entire sea including waters, islands, reefs, shoals and rocky outcrops nearer to other countries.

Asean states Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam also claim parts of the sea, while Taiwan is a sixth claimant.

While China always acted with “self restraint,” Mr. Wang warned “for those groundless provocative activities, the Chinese side is bound to make clear and firm reactions.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is in Naypyidaw for the regional meet, called on all parties to refrain from actions that could deepen hostilities.

China plans to build lighthouses on five islands in the South China Sea, state media reported Thursday, in defiance of calls from the United States and the Philippines for a freeze on such activity to ease tension over rival claims.

At least two of the islands upon which China said it will erect lighthouses appear to be in waters also claimed by Vietnam.

Overlapping claims in the South China Sea have fueled confrontation in recent months with China, which claims 90 percent of the sea, at odds with Vietnam and the Philippines in particular.

The state-run China News Service said Chinese authorities had been surveying sites for lighthouses on five islands, known in English as North Reef, Antelope Reef, Drummond Island, South Sand and Pyramid Rock.

The survey began on July 27, and “as of Aug. 4 construction sites and alternative locations for lighthouses on the five islands and reefs had been initially decided upon,” the news service said, quoting a Chinese navigation official.

Drummond Island and Pyramid Rock are in the China-controlled Paracel Islands — more than 100 small coral islands and reefs also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

It is not clear whether the other three islets where lighthouses will be built are also in disputed waters.

The proposal to freeze activities that could stir tension in the sea, such as building installations and exploiting resources, was put forward by the United States last month and taken up by the Philippines.

With China firming up in the coming two or three months a “masterplan” for its ambitious land and maritime “new Silk Road” project, a top official has said Beijing wants India to play a key role in the initiative.

Beijing envisages an economic corridor linking its south-western Yunnan province through Myanmar to Kolkata as a key segment of a land-based “Silk Road economic belt,” and is also planning to boost ties with port cities, such as Chennai, through a “Maritime Silk Road” starting out from south-eastern Fujian province and linking littoral countries in the region.

Outlining China’s plans for a “new Silk Road”, expected to be finalised in the next three months, Gao Zhenting, Counsellor, Department of International Economic Affairs of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said the master plan, envisages renewing the old Silk Road linkages connecting China to South Asia, Central Asia and Europe.

The plan is expected to emphasise infrastructure projects aimed at boosting regional connectivity, as well as a range of initiatives such as maritime connectivity and ecological cooperation.

“After the ‘one belt’ and ‘one road’ plan is ready, the Chinese government will have further communication with the Indian government on how to promote our cooperation in this field,” he said speaking to The Hindu in Xian, the provincial capital of Shaanxi that was the historical starting point of the old Silk Road.

Today, the province is among the selected regions that have has been tasked with taking forward the new initiative.

“On maritime cooperation, we would like the participation of all ports along the Maritime Silk Road, and priority will be given to establishing Special Economic Zones and industrial parks in these areas,” Mr. Gao said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping first announced the economic belt on a visit to Kazakhstan in September last year, and unveiled the Maritime Silk Road plan when visiting Southeast Asia in October.

Mr. Gao said, “From a historical point of view, India is the converging point of the Maritime Silk Road and the Silk Road on land. More than 2,000 years ago, India, through the passage of the southern Silk Road, had very good exchanges with ancient China. The Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian is a very good example; in the past, Master Xuan Zang [or Hsuan Tsang] travelled through the South Silk Road and arrived in ancient India and studied Buddhism there. Throughout the history of Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road, scholars and businessmen from India visited China. Chinese people still remember many of their names and stories. So in China we have a belief that China and India have both benefited from both roads. Based on that, the Chinese government believes inevitably that naturally India is one of the important partners for us to build one belt and one road.”

He said the proposed Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) road from Kunming to Kolkata would play “a key role” in the economic belt. The first working group meeting of BCIM countries was held in Kunming in December, with a second to be held this October in Bangladesh.Seminar planned

The Chinese government, Mr. Gao said, was is also in consultations with Indian Embassy officials in Beijing and was planning a seminar to be held in India later this year to bring together policymakers and think-tank to provide “intellectual support” for the plan.

They've been grabbing headlines nearly everywhere else, but the jihadis of northern Iraq haven't been getting much play in China. But a threat by the Islamic State (IS) of revenge against countries, including China, for seizing what IS calls "Muslim rights" appears to have changed all that. The comments were made in early July, but the news didn't jump the language barrier from Arabic into Mandarin until August 8, when Phoenix Weekly, a Hong Kong-based newsmagazine widely distributed in China, made the IS revenge threats against China its cover story. Since then, the article has been widely syndicated on Chinese news websites and gained traction on social media as well. Ordinary Chinese who may have felt distant from the carnage now feel it creeping closer to home.

The glossy cover of the Phoenix issue features a picture of masked gun-toting jihadis advancing through a desert landscape. The piece inside sounds the alarm over a July 4 speech in Mosul, Iraq by IS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi where he urged Muslims around the world to pledge their allegiance to him. It quotes Al-Baghdadi saying that "Muslim rights are forcibly seized in China, India, Palestine" and more than a dozen other countries and regions. "Your brothers all over the world are waiting for your rescue, and are anticipating your brigades," al-Baghdadi told his followers. Phoenix noted that China was mentioned first on al-Baghdadi's list. (The article also includes a map that some news reports have said shows the vast territory IS plans to occupy in the next five years, which appears to include a significant portion of Xinjiang. Although the authenticity of the map, which was widely shared on English-language social media sites in early July, has been questioned, the Phoenix piece reports it as fact.)

Online, Chinese are both agitated and bemused. One Chinese reader wrote on the social media site Weibo: "This is good. It offends all five of the hooligans on the UN Security Council" -- that is, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- which means the IS jihadis "are going to be roadkill." Another responded to a photo of Al-Baghdadi: "Looking at this bearded pervert makes me sick. Hurry up and incinerate this kind of trash, and send him to enjoy his 72 virgins in heaven." A third wrote that ISIS seemed to have "a death wish," but that people should be grateful because the jihadist group was giving Beijing "a reasoned and evidence-based opportunity to crack down on terrorist activities."

This may constitute a welcome opening for Chinese authorities. China has been fighting a low-level separatist insurgency of its own in Xinjiang for decades and worries that foreign Islamic groups are infiltrating the region, emboldening the simmering independence movement. Uighur exile groups say China's government overstates its terrorism problem and falsely paints protests that turn to riots as premeditated terror attacks. In any case, Beijing is likely alarmed by IS's criticism of its treatment of the Muslim Uighurs and alleged plan to seize Xinjiang, no matter how far-fetched the idea might be. But just how actively authorities will deal with any IS threat remains to be seen.

Beijing has consistently tried to keep itself removed from the political and military crises roiling Iraq, even as China has poured billions of dollars into Iraqi oil, enough that about 10 percent of its oil imports come from the middle eastern country. China's most decisive action since ISIS's surge has been to evacuate 10,000 Chinese working in Iraq. On July 8, Chinese special envoy Wu Sike met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and pledged anti-terror support, but added that Beijing would fully respect the country's sovereignty. When Wu returned to Beijing he briefed reporters about the trip on July 29, telling them that China was the victim of terror with roots in Syria and Iraq. "Solving the conflicts in Iraq and Syria will benefit China and the entire world," he said.

But Beijing's reaction to U.S. airstrikes in Iraq betrays its conflicted allegiances. China usually bristles at or condemns U.S. intervention in global hotspots and has opposed U.S. sanctions against Sudan, Syria, Russia, and Iran. But the interests of Washington and Beijing are unusually closely aligned when it comes to Iraq. On August 8, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson saying that China was "keeping an open mind" about operations that would "help maintain security and stability" in Iraq. The statement came in response to a request for comment on U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement that the U.S. would carry out airstrikes against insurgents in northern Iraq. Wang Chong, a researcher at Charhar Institute, a public diplomacy think tank in Beijing, wrote on Weibo that he "firmly supported" the U.S. crackdown on IS. Wang added that the United Staes "ought to send ground troops to wipe out those brutal terrorists" and that if there was a need, "China could also send troops to help and provide training."

That's possible -- within limits. Zhu Weilie, director of the Middle East Studies Institute at Shanghai International Studies University, told the state-run Global Times on July 29 that China believes the United Nations should lead anti-terror operations in the Middle East. "China will be more actively involved in these efforts but will never be as involved in Middle East affairs as the United States," he said.

China-Southeast Asia: The meeting in Burma of the ASEAN Regional Forum last week to discuss sovereignty issues in the South China Sea ended without progress. Although the US delegation said it succeeded in conveying its points to China, the Chinese ignored the US position to restate theirs - that the waters and land areas of the South and East China Seas belong to China.

A Philippine proposal sought to give the United Nations jurisdiction over disputes. The Chinese rejected the proposal, asserting there is no dispute, so there is no basis for UN meddling.{Very simple, India should use the same logic of 'no dispute' to its advantage with the Chinese!}

US and Australian delegations said the US and Australia would monitor China's activities.

Comment: The stated purpose of the meeting was to craft an arrangement to reduce tension and the risk of confrontation and to agree to not undertake actions to raise tension.

The UN is always the last resort of weak states to try to hobble more powerful states. The US sided with the weak states against China. The Chinese will remember this.

China's approach is laughable. It is like a proverb in Tamil which goes like this: If a cat closes its eyes it thinks the world has gone dark.

PRC claims no dispute with the Philippines because of what it says is correct, that is that the Paracel islands belong to China. End of matter. When it intrudes into Indian territory, it is no intrusion as the Chinese are simply on their own land. End of matter. It has no disputes with any other claimants in the South or East China Seas, such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei or Malaysia, because the very name suggests that the entire sea, its wealth, its islands, the airspace above all belong to China. End of matter.

India on Wednesday said it is "watchful and conscious" of China's increasing military profile and was taking steps to counter any possible threat from the neighbouring country to its security.

"India remains conscious and watchful of the implications of China's increasing military profile in our immediate and extended neighbourhood and its development of infrastructure in the border areas.

"India is also taking necessary measures to develop the requisite capabilites to counter any adverse impact on our own security," the defence ministry has said in its annual report.

The report states that the unresolved boundary dispute between the two countries is a major factor in India's security calculus.

Also, against the backdrop of China's dispute with Japan over island territories and its objection to maritime traffic in the South China Sea, the ministry has said that the tensions in Asia-Pacific have created tensions in the region and are threatening to polarise the regional community.

The ministry has said that India has important political, economic and social interests in the Asia-Pacific region and has stakes in its enjoying continued peace and stability.

"India supports freedom of navigation in international waters and the right of passage as per international laws. India's view is that all countries must exercise restraint and resolve issues diplomatically without the threat of use of force," it said.

On the regional security situation, the report said the scenario in South Asia "continues to be dynamic, with terrorism, insurgency and sectarian conflict emerging from our immediate neighbourhood increasingly threatening regional stability".

India is committed to building an open, dialogue-based security cooperation with all partners in the neighbourhood on the basis of equality and mutual benefit and respect, the ministry added.

As India prepares to receive Chinese President Xi Jinping next month, New Delhi must make up its mind on Beijing’s invitation to jointly build the new silk roads in inner Asia and the Indo-Pacific littoral. Since he became president in March 2013, Xi has made the construction of silk roads a priority for China’s foreign policy. Like all Chinese initiatives, this too can be recalled easily with a simple catch-phrase: “One Belt and One Road”.

The “belt” refers to a network of overland corridors that China is developing. Over the years, Beijing has built new roads and rail links from its eastern seaboard to far-flung regions in western and southwestern regions in China. Having connected its distant frontiers to the heartland with highways, railroads and pipelines, China now wants to extend them all across the Eurasian landmass.

During his visit to Central Asia last September, Xi proposed the creation of a “Silk Road Economic Belt” that would more than emulate the historic silk road that connected China to the Mediterranean. In essence, the belt is all about economic connectivity. Xi proposed that China and its neighbours should build a transportation corridor from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea and gradually develop an overland network that connects east Asia, the Middle East and the subcontinent. Xi emphasised the importance of policy communication, trade facilitation at the borders, use of local currencies and people-to-people exchanges.

A month later, in Southeast Asia, Xi articulated the idea of a “21st century maritime silk road” that connects the Pacific and Indian Oceans, or more specifically, China’s coastline with Southeast Asia, the subcontinent, the Gulf and the east coast of Africa. Under the “One Road” proposal, China wants to build hard and soft maritime infrastructure throughout the Indo-Pacific, including new ports and special economic zones around them. Beijing is eager to assist the countries in the littoral improve customs coordination, expand e-commerce and develop the necessary institutions. Putting its money where its mouth is, China announced a fund of $500 million to promote the maritime silk road in Southeast Asia.

Indian Junction

In a briefing to international reporters last week in Xian, the ancient capital of China from where the silk roads once headed out, Chinese officials highlighted the special importance of India, which they say is at the intersection of the overland silk roads and the maritime silk routes.

Many roads of the “belt” are inching towards India. These include the Pakistan economic corridor that connects Kashgar in Xinjiang with Karachi and Gwadar on the Arabian coast. This will run across the mighty Karakorams and through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

China is extending its Tibet railway line from Lhasa to the Indian frontiers in the south. Beijing is urging Delhi to jointly develop a trans-Himalayan economic zone of cooperation with Nepal and Bhutan. Beijing has also been talking to Delhi about the so-called BCIM corridor to link the Yunnan province in southwestern China with Myanmar, Bangladesh and eastern India. Xi had raised this issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when they met for the first time on the margins of the BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, last month.

Modi’s ChoiceIt is no secret that the Indian security establishment is deeply suspicious of China’s silk road initiatives. The UPA government, which did not want to say “no” to Beijing, simply strung the Chinese along. Delhi’s strategic community has long objected to China’s road construction on land frontiers and port-building in the Indian Ocean as “strategic encirclement”. Modi, however, needs to take a fresh look.

India badly needs connectivity and, despite much rhetoric on the subject, Delhi has made little advance in recent years. Modi, then, must ask: What is wrong with India partnering China on the belt and the road? Probing further, Modi will find China is not the only option on connectivity; Japan and America are eager to collaborate with India. Upon deeper reflection Modi might see three urgent imperatives: upgrade India’s own frontier connectivity, modernise border management, build new ports and develop better coordination between the government and Indian corporate entities on taking up infrastructure projects abroad.

With a policy for achieving these objectives in place, India can cooperate and compete with China on regional connectivity. But if Modi ducks the issue, he will be paving the way for India’s marginalisation from the unfolding geo-economic transformation in Asia and the Indo-Pacific.

KrisP wrote:Beijing has also been talking to Delhi about the so-called BCIM corridor to link the Yunnan province in southwestern China with Myanmar, Bangladesh and eastern India. Xi had raised this issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when they met for the first time on the margins of the BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, last month.

Another attempt to pry Myanmar away from Western influence and bring it back into Chinese influence, with Indian help.

BEIJING: China on Friday inaugurated its second railway line in Tibet, built at a cost of $2.16 billion, close to Indian border in Sikkim, enhancing mobility of its military in the remote and strategic Himalayan region.

The 253-km railway line links Tibet's provincial capital Lhasa with Xigaze, the second-largest city in Tibet and also the traditional seat of the pro-Beijing Panchen Lama — stated to be second important Monk in Tibetan hierarchy

It reduces the travel time between Lhasa and Xigaze from the current four hours by highway to around two hours, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

It is the second railway line in Tibet and an extension of the Qinghai-Tibet railway, the world's highest rail link connecting China's mainland with Tibet.

Construction of the railway line started in 2010 with an investment of 13.28 billion yuan ($2.16 billion).

In addition to this, China last month unveiled plans to construct a new crucial railway line in Tibet close to Arunachal Pradesh, which Chinese analysts say could act as a "bargaining chip" during the border talks with India.

The construction of another railway line linking Lhasa to Nyingchi in the east is also expected to start soon, recent official media report said.

Nyingchi is located right close to Arunachal, the nearest area to the border. China claims Arunachal as part of Tibet.

The railway expansion will connect, Nepal, Bhutan and India by 2020, the report said.

The construction of a railway connecting Xigaze with Gyirong county, close to Nepal, will be constructed under the five year plan ending 2020, an official recently said.

Gyirong county has a checkpoint connecting Nepal and Yatung county, close to Indian border near Sikkim and Bhutan, a trade centre bordering India and Bhutan.

China is keen onPresident Xi Jinping visiting Gujarat when he arrives in India next month on his first visit to the country since taking over as President last year. While both sides are currently in consultations over the schedule and details of the visit — which is set to take place in the third week of September — it is understood that Gujarat is one of the destinations under consideration for the Chinese President.

A visit by Mr. Xi to Gujarat will hold special symbolism for several reasons. For China, it will reinforce the government’s close relations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi — as well as Beijing’s support to the State — stretching back over the past decade, when Mr. Modi made several visits to China as Gujarat Chief Minister at a time when his ties with the West were strained.

Preparations for President Xi Jinping’s visit to India next month have factored a visit by the Chinese leader to Gujarat. While the plans for the visit are yet to be firmed up, Gujarat is understood to be the preferred destination for Mr. Xi, who will also hold meetings in New Delhi with Mr. Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee.Chinese investment

Chinese officials have viewed the State as a model for their economic ties with India. Gujarat has been among the biggest destinations for Chinese investment in India, with Beijing looking to take forward plans to set up industrial parks in India, in part based on its experience in Gujarat.

China also seeks to elevate a trade relationship — so far driven largely by transactional exchanges over raw materials from India and machinery from China — to a deeper and more advanced level.

It is hoped that the visit will also deepen what officials have described as a personal rapport established between the two when they met at the BRICS Summit in Brazil last month. Mr. Xi spent had praised Gujarat’s model of development, drawing parallels with China’s own experiment of economic opening up launched in southern provinces in the early 1990s.

Another destination said to be under consideration — but less likely — is Kochi. China is keen to project its historical links with Kochi through the ancient Maritime Silk Road at a time when Beijing is eager to involve India with its new “one belt, one road” project.

The Chinese President will visit India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka next month. The Chinese side was keen for Mr. Xi to begin his visit in India. However, with President Pranab Mukherjee in Vietnam at the same time, the schedule of the visit will likely have to be readjusted with Mr. Xi travelling to India after his visits to Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Chinese police have opened fire on Tibetan demonstrators in southwestern China, wounding 10 people, after the Tibetans protested against the detention of a respected village leader, a Tibetan rights group said.

The crackdown in the Ganzi prefecture of Sichuan province, a flash point for Tibetan protests against Chinese rule, underscores simmering tensions between Tibetans and the Chinese authorities.

The U.K.-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) group, citing several Tibetan sources in exile, said late on Wednesday the area “is now under tight control, with local Tibetans including the elderly and children subject to interrogation.”

Photographs that circulated on social media showed Tibetans with “serious wounds on the head and torso” after the incident, the ICT said.

The United States said it was concerned by reports that Chinese authorities had opened fire on protesters. “We continue to call on the Chinese government to permit all citizens, including Tibetans and other ethnic minorities, to express grievances freely, publicly, peacefully, and without fear of retribution,” a State Department statement said.

Human rights activists say China tramples on religious freedom and culture in Tibet, which it has ruled with an iron fist since People’s Liberation Army troops “peacefully liberated” the region in 1950.

China rejects such criticism, saying its rule ended serfdom and brought development to a backward, poverty-stricken region. Tibet remains tightly controlled and foreign journalists are largely banned from visiting, making it very difficult to verify independently such reports of unrest.

The ICT said Tibetans had gathered to protest after the village leader, identified as Wangdak, was taken from his home in the middle of the night on Monday or Tuesday and detained. According to the report, Wangdak had expressed his support for a traditional gathering at the start of a horse festival, in which Tibetans burn incense and make prayer offerings, after it appeared that official restrictions were likely.

The government in Ganzi could not be reached for comment.

Ganzi has seen some of the most violent clashes between Tibetans and Chinese authorities. According to the ICT, two Tibetans were shot in the head and at least eight others seriously wounded after police opened fire on unarmed Tibetans who had gathered to mark the Dalai Lama’s birthday last year.

The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled to India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

Tibetan parts of China erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 2008. Since then, 131 Tibetans have set themselves alight in protest against Chinese rule, mainly in heavily Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces rather than in what China terms the Tibet Autonomous Region. Most of those who set themselves on fire have died.

The United States could help build Vietnam's naval capacity if a ban on selling lethal weapons to the authoritarian nation is lifted, the most senior US military officer to visit Vietnam for decades said Saturday.

General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that "in the near term" there would be a discussion in the United States about whether to lift the ban introduced over human rights concerns.

Dempsey was speaking to reporters in southern Ho Chi Minh City during a four-day visit to the country during which he has met top military officials to discuss strengthening military cooperation.

"The maritime domain is the place of our greatest common interest right now... and my recommendation if the ban is lifted will be that we start with that," he said.

China today wrapped up its latest anti-Japanese propaganda campaign amid continuing sharp disputes with Tokyo over territorial claims and history.

State media published the last of 45 confessions of convicted Japanese World War II criminals, that of a military police commander accused of ordering dozens of executions.

The campaign was launched this summer in response to statements by Japanese politicians and public figures seen as minimising Japan's brutal eight-year invasion and occupation of much of China in the 1930s and 1940s.

Those included comments by officials at public broadcaster NHK, one of whom denied the Nanking massacre -- in which China claims 300,000 civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed -- happened at all

Another downplayed the Imperial Army's use of sex slaves, an issue that has chilled Japan's relations with South Korea as well.

Prior to that, China had (sic) outraged by Japan's nationalisation of East China Sea islands claimed by Beijing two years ago, as well as a visit in December by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a Tokyo shrine honoring the war dead, including Class-A war criminals such as wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.

Along with launching successive waves of anti-Japanese vitriol, China has frozen high-level diplomatic contacts and regularly sends patrol boats to challenge Japanese craft near the uninhabited islands called Diaoyu by China and Senkaku by Japan.

KrisP wrote:Can someone enlighten me more about the deep implications of India joining or not joining the silk road project? Or at least point me to the right post or in the right direction please. Thank you.

KrisP, I think I had posted the following in the now inactive thread. I am re-posting.

The MSR initiative has to be seen in a larger context. For long, the Chinese strategic thinkers had given greater emphasis on a blue-water navy as the most important weapon, even above the possession of nuclear weapons. With the rapid building up of their naval force with such platforms as the Jin-class SSBNs with their 12000 KM range JL-2 ballistic missiles which have just started patrolling the seas, the conclusion of building the aircraft carrier, and the incremental presence of the PLAN in the Indian and Pacific oceans, the Chinese feel that they now have the muscle to exploit the navy for economic, diplomatic, strategic and military purposes. The MSR is a well-disguised attempt to achieve these objectives. If the US talks of Indo-Pacific, the Chinese want to demonstrate that they have a large presence in both these oceans. It is on the basis if this new-found maritime strength that the Chinese leadership led by Xi Jinping is pursuing an ‘active foreign policy’. China wants to be able to dominate in the sea in the area it calls as the ‘First Island Chain’, a chain stretching from Japan to Indonesia. It also helps the Chinese to exploit the natural resources of the IOR (Indian Ocean Region) states and undermine the Indian influence there. The Chinese want to establish a multimodal transportation system along the MSR, like for example the railway, energy and road network it is building along the Karakoram linking Kashgar in Xinjiang with the port in Gwadar along the Makran coast of Balochistan. In order to fund these projects, China has setup ‘Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank’(AIIB) to rival the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). In order to mask its real ambitions, China intends to setup the Headquarters of this bank either in Jakarta or in Singapore.IMO, China will carefully control the NDB of the BRICS so that its infrastructure funding does not in any way undermine its strategic objectives through the MSR.

Indian and Chinese armed forces held a ceremonial border personnel meeting in eastern Ladakh and committed to uphold peace along the Line of Actual Control.

The meeting comprising delegations of the Indian Army and ITBP on the Indian side and the People’s Liberation Army on the Chinese side, was held on August 15, 2014 marking Independence Day, PRO, Defence, Udhampur-based Northern Command, Col. S.D. Goswami said.

“Both sides reiterated their commitment in upholding the protocols and agreements signed between the two countries and acknowledged that the peace and tranquillity which prevails along the Line of Actual Control should be further strengthened and stabilised,” Col. Goswami said.

The celebrations, which began with the hoisting of the national flag at the BPM Hut, included cultural and entertainment shows and sports events, and lasted for approximately four hours, the officer said, adding that the event symbolises growing peace, confidence and desire of establishing tranquillity along the borders.

“Participation of Chinese delegation in India’s Independence Day celebrations is a gesture which will further foster friendly relations between India and China and build up mutual trust and confidence,” he said.

A similar ceremony was held on the Chinese side on the People’s Liberation Army Day on August 1, Col. Goswami said.

Chinese troops are reported to have entered 25 to 30 km deep into Indian territory in Burtse area in Ladakh where they had pitched their tents last year that had led to a tense three-week standoff.

Official sources said on Monday a patrol of Indian troops noticed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel on Sunday while moving from their base towards the higher ‘New Patrol base’ post in Burtse area of North Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir. The area is at an altitude of 17,000 feet.

The sources said the troops after walking barely 1.5 km from their base spotted the Chinese personnel in Indian territory 25 to 30 km from the perceived Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Adhering to newly drafted Standard Operating Procedures, the Indian troops returned back to their base.

The troops went on a patrol again to the ‘New Patrol base’ post in the wee hours of Monday.

However, the team found no change in the situation as it noticed the PLA personnel still sitting on the ground with flags reading “this is Chinese territory, go back” in their hands.

A Quick Reaction Team had also accompanied the Indian patrol but nothing could be achieved as Chinese refused to budge from their position, the sources said, adding finally Indian troops returned to their base and informed their higher ups.

Udhampur-based Army Spokesperson Col S D Goswami denied that any such incident had taken place but said there was no commonly delineated LAC between India and China which led to transgressions.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a rising China, in possession of a modernising military, must be in want of a non-militarised Japan. So is Beijing being foolish by acting assertively in the East China Sea, thereby helping to fuel Japan's evolution into a full-fledged military rival?

Perhaps not, says Hugh White. Based on analyses by Amy King and Brad Glosserman, he argues that either China doesn't believe that Japan can become a 'normal' military power (in which case Tokyo would have little choice but to accept a subordinate role to Beijing in Asia), or China calculates that its assertiveness and Japan's militaristic response will drive a permanent wedge in the US-Japan alliance, to China's benefit.

The possibilities Hugh raises are certainly compelling. China's coercive behaviour has so far elicited a relatively ambivalent response from America. Although Washington talks a tough game in Asia, and has continued apace with military exercises with other powers in the region that share its concerns about China's military modernisation, other aspects of its behaviour are cause for concern. Washington still felt the need to send two very different messages about its intentions to audiences in the US and in Asia (a point the Lowy Institute's Michael Fullilove recently raised with US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in Singapore). Attempts at emphasising the non-military dimensions of Washington's 'pivot to Asia,' the mixed response to China's extension of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea, and budgetary considerations all point to waning enthusiasm in Washington for confronting Beijing.

There's also good reason to suspect Japan's long-term political appetite for a strategic rivalry with China.

Prime ministers have short life-spans in Japan (even the charismatic Junichiro Koizumi lasted only five years) and incumbent Shinzo Abe's position on reinterpreting Japan's constitution is not necessarily shared by some within his own party, let alone the wider Japanese political and bureaucratic establishment. The sharp decline in Abe's approval ratings to below 50% raise further questions about his political longevity and, with it, Japan's future as a normal military power.

The ambivalence of America and the possible unsustainability of Japan's response to China's provocations are mirrored in other regional powers. Vietnam is of two minds about confronting China, with the wing of its Communist Party's Politburo that favours accommodating Beijing reportedly ascendant. Even in India, where anti-Chinese sentiment is incredibly high, there's a continuing desire to diversify relations with all major powers, which means deepening ties with China even as it hedges against Chinese assertiveness. This tendency was recently underscored by rumours that India may join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a full member later this year.

But while all these developments might suggest that Beijing is playing its cards shrewdly (staking its claims and asserting its dominant regional position without risking a significant backlash), White's argument falls short on a simple but important point. He presents a binary choice for China in the Indo-Pacific: either it will confront the US, supported by a self-constrained, pacified Japan; or it will face a remilitarised Japan that lacks the full backing of the US-Japan alliance.

Yet there's a third possibility that White has overlooked, one that is much more troublesome from Beijing's standpoint. That is the evolution of a strategic, security, and technological compact among resident Asian powers that serves to balance China. Chief among these balancers would be Japan and India, but Vietnam, Australia, and others could all conceivably play crucial roles. Indeed, Rory Medcalf and C Raja Mohan have recently raised this very possibility: the emergence of middle-power coalitions in the Indo-Pacific.

The one that has Beijing most worried, judging by the rushed visit of Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi to New Delhi in June, is the emerging strategic relationship between India and Japan. Security ties between these two countries are, at present, at risk of being both wildly oversold and under-explored. But there is no discounting the potential. As I've written elsewhere, India and Japan share similar concerns about Chinese intentions (both are locked in territorial disputes with China) and have doubts about Washington's commitment to the region. They also have complementary strengths, with Japan's financial resources and technological sophistication a natural foil for India's manpower-heavy and battle-hardened military.

A security partnership with India offers Japan at least two other benefits, both of which, if carried through, could undermine Beijing's plans for regional hegemony. Japan's military-to-military contacts with India enable it to prepare for out-of-area contingencies, particularly in the maritime realm, which represents a key step in Japan's path to becoming a normal military power. More significantly, the possibility of joint production of the US-2 aircraft with India, and its potential export to third countries, could mark a major development as part of Japan's reversal of its self-imposed ban on defence exports.

There is a tendency in some quarters to downplay Beijing's ability to make mistakes. Even its handling of public relations — not exactly China's strong suit — can somehow be re-interpreted as an act of brilliance and sophistication. While White rightly raises two scenarios in which China's assertiveness towards Japan reaps dividends, it's hard to completely discount the possibility that Beijing is being short-sighted. China's leaders might relish the thought of unquestioned Asian dominance or a revanchist campaign against an isolated Japan. But the emergence of a balancing coalition led by Japan and India (and possibly including others) presents a much more daunting prospect.

Philippines-China:The Philippines will file a new diplomatic protest with China that complains about frequent patrols by Chinese ships in areas of the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines, the Department of Foreign Affairs said Monday. The department's spokesman said the 'pattern of illegitimate sovereignty patrols' in the Philippines' 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone were part of China's efforts to change the status quo{It is the same pattern along Indian borders too} in the South China Sea in violation of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and a 2002 regional accord that called for an end to tension-producing actions in the disputed waters."

Comment: Two Chinese hydrographic ships are patrolling in the Reed Bank, northwest of Palawan Island. This is one of the areas for which the Philippines granted permission to a British company to explore for oil and gas. The Chinese called that action illegal and invalid.

The Chinese patrols enforce China's claim to sovereignty. The Philippines can't match China in a sea confrontation, so the diplomatic protests are a means of ensuring that the Chinese leaders know the Philippines has not abandoned its claims.

Chinese troops are reported to have entered 25 to 30 km deep into Indian territory in Burtse area in Ladakh where they had pitched their tents last year that had led to a tense three-week standoff.

Official sources said on Monday a patrol of Indian troops noticed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel on Sunday while moving from their base towards the higher ‘New Patrol base’ post in Burtse area of North Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir. The area is at an altitude of 17,000 feet.

The sources said the troops after walking barely 1.5 km from their base spotted the Chinese personnel in Indian territory 25 to 30 km from the perceived Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Adhering to newly drafted Standard Operating Procedures, the Indian troops returned back to their base.

The troops went on a patrol again to the ‘New Patrol base’ post in the wee hours of Monday.

However, the team found no change in the situation as it noticed the PLA personnel still sitting on the ground with flags reading “this is Chinese territory, go back” in their hands.

A Quick Reaction Team had also accompanied the Indian patrol but nothing could be achieved as Chinese refused to budge from their position, the sources said, adding finally Indian troops returned to their base and informed their higher ups.

Udhampur-based Army Spokesperson Col S D Goswami denied that any such incident had taken place but said there was no commonly delineated LAC between India and China which led to transgressions.

Vietnam has renewed India's lease of two oil blocks in the South China Sea for another year, on the eve of foreign minister Sushma Swaraj's first visit to Hanoi next week. The move reaffirms India's position as a continuing commercial stakeholder in a region where territorial disputes between southeast Asian nations and China have flared up recently.

Swaraj will travel up to China for a meeting of the almost irrelevant Russia-India-China grouping. before having bilateral meetings with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. The meeting is part of the preparation for Chinese premier Xi Jinping's visit here in mid September.

The oil blocks, 128, have little commercial value because the Indian entity, OVL had concluded there is little prospect of striking oil in that area. After India gave up the blocks in 2012, Vietnam persuaded India to stay on to explore further. That lease expired this year and has just been renewed. India clearly remains there because it believes it has strategic interests in the South China Sea. India maintains the importance of free lanes of navigation and access to resources. It also gives India a very good reason to keep a naval presence there. Indian naval vessels run goodwill visits in all the countries affected by China's expansionist foreign policy.

Chinese assertiveness in South China Sea sharpened in May this year, when China sent its mobile oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 to Vietnamese waters for alleged oil exploration, despite Hanoi's protests. Although the Chinese withdrew on July 15, it stamped its hegemonic presence there, asserting its right to move at will. More recently, China has announced it will build lighthouses on five islands in South China Sea, of which two islands are in waters claimed by Vietnam. This was announced as a reaction to a possible move by Asean countries to freeze all activity. China showed it would build whatever, wherever on the East Sea. According to Beijing's maps, China claims almost 90 per cent of the East Sea.

The Chinese strategy in South China Sea is the same as it is in Depsang and Demchok area in Ladakh. It makes a series of small transgressions, each individually not big enough to spark a conflict. But repeating the same exercise, China seeks to change the status quo in its favour. Recently, China had also dispatched a minor flotilla of fishing vessels around Phillippines, to assert its claims.

Vietnam is building ties with others and has drawn closer to US, Japan Korea and India. Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida recently announced Japan would give six used naval boats to Vietnam to boost its patrols and surveillance capacity in the East Sea. Vietnam also wants India's Brahmos missile but the UPA government has dragged its feet on the decision, largely because of the dangers of the missile designs ending up with the Chinese.

Swaraj will travel up to China for a meeting of the almost irrelevant Russia-India-China grouping. before having bilateral meetings with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. The meeting is part of the preparation for Chinese premier Xi Jinping's visit here in mid September.

Does the meeting, in bold, refer to SCO? Is it a deliberate underplay?

Swaraj will travel up to China for a meeting of the almost irrelevant Russia-India-China grouping. before having bilateral meetings with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. The meeting is part of the preparation for Chinese premier Xi Jinping's visit here in mid September.

Does the meeting, in bold, refer to SCO? Is it a deliberate underplay?

No, it is the annual RIC meeting. This is in Beijing while the RIC meeting is in Dushanbe.

Canada has banned journalists with China's official news agency and the Communist Party newspaper from joining Prime Minister Stephen Harper on an Arctic trip, prompting complaints by Chinese reporters who say they're being discriminated against.

The ban comes at a time when relations between the two countries are already strained. The Canadian government recently accused Chinese hackers of infiltrating the computer systems of Canada's top research and development organization, which China denies. Just a few days later, authorities in China arrested a Canadian couple on suspicion of stealing state secrets about military and national defense research. They remain in custody.

The decision not to have reporters for the People's Daily and the Xinhua News Agency travel with Harper stems from an incident during last year's trip to the Arctic, when Li Xuejiang of the People's Daily pushed former Harper spokeswoman Julie Vaux after she prevented him from asking a question.

Jason MacDonald, chief Harper spokesman, said in an email Friday from the Arctic that "some media outlets are not welcome on the trip."

In a telephone interview, Li acknowledged pushing Vaux last year, but said the prime minister's office discriminated against Chinese journalists by not allowing him to ask a question and later having him manhandled by police.

"They used the police force to get me out of the line of the journalists. It's very rare in the world," he said. "They made bruise on my arm."

Li, the bureau chief for the Communist Party newspaper and a former Washington correspondent, said he couldn't understand why he was silenced. Harper's staff limits the number of questions at public events.

Li said he didn't even apply to go on this year's trip.

"Why do they discriminate against Chinese journalists? For racial reasons?" he said. "They didn't give me any reason."

Xinhua News Agency reporter Baodong Li said he applied but was told he could not go because of a lack of space. He doesn't understand why he was banned.

"This is really ridiculous. This is not just against Mr. Li of the People's Daily, it's also against all the Chinese journalists," Baodong said. "It has nothing to do with me."

Li and Baodong said they are considering issuing a complaint with the Ottawa press gallery.

David Mulroney, Canada's ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012, said journalists in China can be quite aggressive, and have been for some time.

"I was once in a melee as they stampeded into a meeting room to get a photo of then-president Jiang Zemin. I believe that journalism is one of those critical aspects of Chinese society that is changing slowly but steadily," Mulroney said in an email.

The above details the state of freedom of the press, media & social network in PRC. A rare article that is critical of that country in this newspaper.

Prompted by scandals, the Chinese government recently issued a set of instructions to the news media highlighting unethical media practices of bribery, fake news, sensationalism and what the government calls “rumour mongering.” The international media highlighted these instructions as a further tightening of China’s authoritarian media control policy. Actually, none of these instructions is new. Many of these, like the June 18 circular issued by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), banning journalists from publishing “critical” news without getting it cleared first with their higher authorities, is merely a restatement of China’s long-standing media control policy. While the recent instructions are ostensibly in response to a string of scandals in the Chinese media, they are a part of President Xi Jinping’s broader media reform policy, outlined during the Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held last year.

Information control

The focus of this effort is to achieve a “systematic release of news,” a euphemism for information control.The Third Plenum report identified the rapid development of microblogs or weibos and “WeChat” along with other forms of social media as a national security problem and recommended “public opinion channelling to ensure order in online communications” as the preferred strategy to tackle this challenge. This was followed by a series of measures that either strengthened existing guidelines or introduced new instructions for the news media. This includes the setting up of a central Internet security and informatisation leading group led by Mr. Xi, with Premier Li Keqiang and Liu Yunshan, Politburo Standing Committee members, as deputy heads. One of the stated tasks of the committee is to protect China from cyber warfare, with the government claiming that there were 9,00,000 cases of hacking attacks on Chinese servers last November. However, the committee also concerns itself with building a “more organised and honest online community” in accordance with state laws.

Since the “reform” of the media in the 1980s, the Chinese media control policy has unequivocally been one of the Party guiding the media. To be fair to the CCP, it has never even pretended to be so otherwise. “Guidance of public opinion” has been a stated policy that has accommodated the demands of a commercial media with political propaganda. Media reforms of the 1980s specifically restructured the financial structure of the media industry, but not the political role of the media. They cut state subsidies to media outlets and gradually weaned away state funding to create self-sustaining commercial entities. Through the 1990s and the last decade, rapid media commercialisation has led to an immense pluralisation of media content, prompting some analysts to suggest a causal link between political changes and the changing mediascape in China.

However, the hierarchical institutional relationship between the Party and media organisations has never been tampered with and has in fact seen a strengthening in the past two years, with greater government oversight of the media. At all media companies, including the press, radio, television and the Internet, editorial policy at all levels must conform with the directions issued by the General Propaganda Department. This applies, without exception, to all publicly available content on the Mainland. Relatively speaking, the Hong Kong Press, given its unique status within the Chinese “one-country-two-systems” arrangement, enjoys greater freedom. However, this is coming under severe stress given the resolve of the Xi Jinping government to systematise all news release.

Impact of social media

More significantly, the political relationship between the government and the media has been facing increasing stress with the advent of the Internet and, specifically, of the exploding social media in China. Pre-publication censorship, effected largely through editorial controls, has begun to fray in the face of an active social media sphere, that though subject to the same censorship as the news media is harder to control. The first impact of social media was to challenge the monopoly on news releases, as was witnessed during the Wenzhou train crash in 2011 where passengers and their loved ones began tweeting updates about the rescue and emergency services as the operation was on. Picking up on this, the train crash was widely covered in the state as well as commercial media. It is arguable that much of this information might not have made it into the public domain even five years ago. It is undeniable that social media has changed the rules in this regard. The most visible example of this is the successful flagging of natural disasters, mining accidents and environmental issues by Chinese netizens, forcing the authorities to respond. Much has been written about the “surround and watch campaigns” in which netizens have tweeted live accounts of protests or other events before the authorities began to clamp down. Some of the more successful of these relate to local level corruption scandals within the government or the Party. Official Internet statistics for 2011 noted that 48.7 per cent of Chinese netizens use microblogs and these have become a major source of news for netizens.

Cross-regional reporting

It was argued that the game began to swing in favour of netizens as opposed to the government’s ability to control the spread of information. In fact, before the explosion of social media on the scene, Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times correspondent, had in 2005 predicted that the Chinese Communist Party was facing “death by a thousand blogs.” However, the evidence on the ground suggests the opposite. Since the Xi Jinping government took over, there is greater control over social and news media, facilitated by the media’s commercial interests that need a stable policy environment in which to operate. This is a dangerous liaison, offsetting the gains of technology for the users in this unfair fight. Over the past two years, given the phenomenal rise in the number of social media users and its impact on the news media, China’s media control policy is being reassembled to tackle the challenges being posed by new technology. Even before the leadership transition was effected, in 2009 — feeling the impact of Internet-facilitated information diffusion — the CCP announced a ban on inter-region reporting for the Chinese news media. This meant that provincial media outlets could not report on local government issues in other parts of the country except their own. This essentially was aimed at restricting the spread of politically undesirable content even if it did get published; a sort of post-hoc damage control censorship, if you will. Chinese local media operates in a space between commercial interests often owned by Party cadres and government officials who pressure the media to conform to positive coverage of the government. For example, the Southern Weekly or the Southern Weekend, a very popular Guangzhou-based paper pursuing investigative journalism, has built its reputation on following matters all over the country while not treading on local toes. The 2009 directive further narrowed the window for real news while conforming to the demands of local media and Party bosses to toe the Party’s line. While cross-regional reporting has continued despite the directive, the political costs of such action has gone up with fewer papers wanting to risk the ire of the authorities.

As reported by the Nieman Reports, the Propaganda Directives issued in 2011 included varied control on news media from presenting necessarily positive reports about the annual spring festival holiday, to not covering any news about the household registration or hukou system that dealt with the transferring of registrations or contracted land deals, to banning the use of the term “civil society.” These directives are, of course, periodically updated and usually address what the Party calls breaches in information security.

This reassembling of censorship continues, with a new directive in July banning Chinese journalists from writing for overseas media. This particular directive states that “journalists should not disclose information they obtain in the course of their work, either on the Internet or to overseas media.” This is in addition to the June 18 directive to not report “critical” news without prior authorisation.Curbs on foreign media

In addition to the curbs on the domestic media, the foreign media in China has been operating under greater constraints in the past two years, with the Chinese government taking harsh punitive measures against news organisations and journalists for unfavourable coverage. Most recently, a New York Times correspondent was asked to leave China for an exposé on the wealth of the family of Wen Jiabao, the former Premier. Foreign news organisations have also protested against the harassment and the manhandling of journalists by Chinese police during the trial of Xu Zhiyong, the leader of the New Citizens’ Movement, that raises the issue of corruption in the Chinese state and party system.

It is evident that the media environment in China is getting more hostile to journalistic reporting and moving more in line with its government-approved commercial and propaganda role. In this, the Chinese government has been successful, as of now, in restricting the political impact of the media. Is it likely to be able to do so in the future as well? Given that the commercial interests of the media are tied in squarely with the political role of the media, there is little hope that the policy is likely to be challenged in a major way by the commercial media. However, there is a visible push back from the journalistic community through acts of defiance, like the Southern Weekend episode earlier this year in which the journalists of the paper publicly objected to the interference of the Provincial Propaganda Department in changing the paper’s high profile annual new year editorial to conform to the Party line. This resulted in an unprecedented strike by the journalists of the paper and there was an outpouring of public support for the paper’s stand. However, the costs of such rebellion in China are increasing manifold with the result that journalistic defiance is beginning to get restricted to a few prominent and internationally known media outlets. The majority of Chinese news media — which is what the average Chinese citizen has access to — is largely conformist and not ready to take on these costs and jeopardise its commercial success.

(Sonika Gupta is an associate professor and the coordinator of the IIT Madras China Studies Centre)

When minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju travels to Sino-Indian border in Ladakh on Friday in the wake of recent incursions by Chinese troops, he might have to encounter a GPS set that shows Indian soldiers in Chinese territory even when they are well within their own borders. He may also be saddled with a vehicle that refuses to start or stops in the middle on way to the border. And if on the way, he wishes to communicate something to Delhi, he may be at loss.

Forces guarding the Sino-Indian border have for years been suffering lack of optimum technological, infrastructural and logistical support—something available aplenty across the border to Chinese troops and something the new government would like to change.

Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), which guards the Sino-Indian border in the high reaches of the Himalayas and inhospitable terrains of Arunachal Pradesh, has GPS sets that use US satellite data. This data naturally does not reflect Indian perception of the border and when troops go patrolling the border, it shows them as being in Chinese territory.

"Not having roads is not the only problem. We should have our own technology. Why should we look like transgressors in our own country," asks an officer.

But technology has been a nagging problem. Not many years ago, families in Chhapra would receive calls of their loved one from China. There was no communication system for jawans to talk to their families. The available technology cost over Rs 80 a minute. Indian soldiers would thus often cross the border and seek help from their Chinese counterparts where it was much cheaper. Things changed only after the government gave all company headquarters Digital Satellite Phone Terminal Systems.

"Still, there is no way to communicate when on transit except to force units. At times jawans go for 30-day long patrols. Would they not want to call back home during that time," asks another officer.

Sources say even at heights of over 20,000-25,000 feet, forces have been given vehicles used in plains. "There is little oxygen and at times vehicles refuse to start as there is no combustion. We need all-terrain vehicles that foreign troops use," says an officer having served in Ladakh.

On the Arunachal border, the situation is worse. For traversing miles of rain forests infested with leeches, poisonous insects and snakes, troops do not even have all-weather shoes and suitable tents. "Combat shoes and jungle shoes that we get are not successful in that terrain. So many, buy their own shoes. As patrols are over 20-day long and it keeps raining, we have to camp in the jungle in make-shift tarpaulin tents. To keep off insects and snakes we sprinkle phenyl around the tent," said an officer posted in Arunachal Pradesh.

Sources said, unlike Army, ITBP does not have an attached company of porters which they have to hire every time they go on patrols. "Even our allowances are not at par with those in the Army, although we work harder than them," said the officer.

Sources said the minister would be given a presentation on all the challenges that the force faces on the border and all that needs to be done to improve operational efficiency and make lives somewhat easier.

India has also, for techno-commercial reasons, decided to extend for another year the work on exploration of oil blocks allotted to it in the South China Sea. The exploration was initially scheduled for two years from 2012, but Indian oil companies have called for an extension. Asked if defence cooperation will be on the agenda, the spokesperson said: “… In the world of diplomacy, some things are better left unsaid and defence cooperation is one of those.”

Indian telecom operators and broadcasters have raised concern over the latest satellite Asiasat-8 launched recently by China which has been designed to keep the border areas of the country away from signals being beamed by these operators and broadcasters.

The operators and the broadcasters point out that the Chinese satellite is not only the most powerful launched so far, but has been designed to take the northern border of India and North East territories out of India beam. These have been made a part of the China beam as if these are a part of the Chinese territory. The territories, which have been earmarked as part of the China beam include the Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), Kashmir, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Bhutan. The satellite was launched by China on August 5.

Reports suggest that the move from China came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the possible SAARC satellite by India to bring the SAARC countries closer.

Asiasat-8 has been designed as a commercial satellite offering VSAT/DTH, Internet and telecommunications capacity for various users in India and China. However hidden in its design is to establish its signals on Indian territory, which China has been disputing and claiming as its own.

Lok Sabha member of Parliament from Maharashtra Hansraj Gangaram Ahir has written to Home Minister Rajnath Singh about the perils of the satellite to India.

In his letter (copy of which is with The Tribune), Ahir has urged the Home Minister to come out with a notification banning the use of this satellite by any Indian Telecom, VSAT or DTH operator.

Ahir has pointed out that the new Chinese satellite will allow anyone in PoK, Ladakh, Leh, Nepal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and all along the northern border of India and North East to use this high-powered satellite to establish two-way communications from India which will be inaccessible to Indian security agencies and poses grave security threat to the country.

An official of one of the major broadcasters from India, not wanting to be identified, says the high power transmitters on the satellite are about 10 times more powerful than any satellite launched before and can be used to deliver DTH, messaging and internet in border areas which will be difficult to counteract unless the use of the satellite is banned by India on its territory. If any Indian broadcasters, telecommunications providers or broadband providers are given capacity on this satellite, these transmissions will not reach Indian users residing in PoK, Ladakh, Leh, Nepal, Sikkim Arunachal Pradesh and other areas in the Northeast. Instead, transmissions from China will reach them.

This satellite, which will be in use for the next 15 years, will effectively mean that China is taking part of Indian territory out of Indian operators’ purview and bringing it under Chinese operators’ purview. What is worrying is that as a result of this satellite and India beam, areas in PoK, Kashmir, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Bhutan and major parts of North East India and East India will come under Chinese surveillance and it will easily be able to monitor the strategic activities of India in these areas, which are of strategic importance to India.

The Defense Ministry plans to use space more effectively to detect early signs of ballistic missile launches by North Korea and bolster Japan’s defensive capabilities {of course that comes as a handy excuse to cover a much bigger threat, China}, a draft of its new space policy showed Friday.

In the basic policy to be formally adopted by the end of August, the ministry hopes to promote empirical research with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It will also consider setting up a special force for space surveillance within the Self-Defense Forces, and developing smaller satellites that can be launched more easily, according to the draft.

Japan has four spy satellites. The Defense Ministry plans to load its infrared sensors onto a new JAXA satellite to conduct research and improve its image-analysis capabilities, the draft says.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to change Japan’s formerly defense-only posture so Japan can be a “more proactive contributor to peace” and because North Korea has repeatedly defied international pressure by launching missiles and other projectiles. It is also gearing up for China’s possible militarization of space.

With the Constitution due to be reinterpreted, rather than formally amended, by the Cabinet to end its pacifist status, Japan and the United States are set to revise their defense cooperation guidelines by the end of the year, with bilateral cooperation in space expected to be one of the key items.

So far, Japan has enabled JAXA to do research on behalf of the nation’s defense since the law on the agency was revised, aiming for greater use of space under the nation’s defense guidelines. Joint Defense Ministry-JAXA research began in April 2013.

The draft states it is “extremely important to use space to prepare for various contingencies, including ballistic missiles.” It goes on to say there exist “grave threats to stable use of space,” citing factors such as an increase in space debris, and moves to develop weapons to shoot down satellites{Clear references to PRC}.

The ministry crafted the first basic policy in 2009 after Japan enacted the Basic Space Law in 2008.

A Chinese fighter jet flew perilously close to a US military aircraft this week in a "very dangerous" incident in international air space east of Hainan Island, the Pentagon said Friday.

The episode raised tensions and underlined the growing rivalry between the United States and China, with Beijing building up its military and asserting its territorial claims across the Pacific.

"On August 19, an armed Chinese fighter jet conducted a dangerous intercept of a US Navy P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft that was on a routine mission," spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby told a news conference.

The close call occurred about 135 miles (220 kilometers) east of China's Hainan, he said.

"We have registered our strong concerns to the Chinese about the unsafe and unprofessional intercept, which posed a risk to the safety and the well-being of the air crew and was inconsistent with customary international law," Kirby added.

The move also threatened to jeopardize longstanding US efforts to bolster relations with China's military, he said, at a time when officials have touted progress in forging a dialogue with Beijing's top brass.

The armed Chinese warplane came close to the surveillance aircraft three times, flying underneath the American plane, at the P-8's nose and then in parallel with the wingtips, less than 30 feet (nine meters) apart, according to Kirby.

In approaching the P-8, the Chinese jet at one point performed a barrel roll, apparently to display its weapons.

"The Chinese jet also passed the nose of the P-8 at 90 degrees with its belly toward the P-8 Poseidon, we believe to make a point of showing its weapons load," Kirby said.

The intercept was "very, very close, very dangerous." The skies over Hainan Island were the scene of a major international incident in April 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a US Navy EP-3 spy plane.

UIGHURS: Outside a mosque in China's restive west, a government-appointed Muslim cleric was dodging a foreign reporter's question about why young men of the Uighur ethnic minority don't have beards when one such youth interrupted.

“Why don't you just tell them the truth?” he shouted to the cleric under the nervous gaze of several police officers who had been tailing the reporters all day in the oasis city of Aksu.

“It's because the government doesn't allow beards."

A plainclothes Uighur policeman swiftly rebuked the young man. “Be careful of what you say,” he warned. The tense exchange provided a fleeting glimpse of both the extremes of China's restrictions on minority Uighurs and the resentment that simmers beneath the surface in their homeland.

Such a mood pervades Xinjiang's south, a vast, mainly rural region that's become a key battleground in the ruling Communist Party's struggle to contain escalating ethnic violence that has killed at least a few hundred people over the past 18 months.

The personal matter of facial hair has taken on heavy political overtones in the Uighur heartland. Also proscribed are certain types of women's headscarves, veils and “jilbabs,” loose, full-length garments worn in public. Such restrictions are not new but their enforcement has intensified this year in the wake of attacks Beijing has blamed on religious extremists.

In a recent sweep of Urumqi, the region's capital, authorities last week said they seized 1,265 hijab-type headscarves, 259 jilbabs and even clothes printed with Islamic star-and-crescent symbols. Officials also “rescued” 82 children from studying the Quran, the government said.

The prohibitions on Islamic attire and beards have attracted widespread criticism, with many experts saying such repression angers ordinary Uighurs and risks radicalizing them.

“It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's self-perpetuating. The more they crack down on it, the more people re-Islamise. This is a pattern we see all over the world,” said Joanne Smith Finley, an expert on Uighurs at Britain's Newcastle University. “The Chinese state has created a growing terrorist threat where previously there was none. It has stimulated an Islamic renewal where there wouldn't necessarily have been one."

A major thrust of the yearlong crackdown on terrorism has been a campaign against religious extremism, with arrests of hundreds of people for watching videos apparently hailing terrorism or extremist ideology. But authorities also are targeting beards, veils and other symbols of religious piety in a campaign that creeps ever farther into Uighurs' daily lives despite official claims that the government respects religious freedom.

“At the moment, we face a very serious, intense and complex situation with fighting terrorism and maintaining stability,” a party newspaper, the Xinjiang Daily, said in an edict to “front-line” minority cadres in late July.

Officials, it said, must also act to control weddings without singing and dancing and funerals where there are no feasts, referring to Uighur customs the government says Islamic conservatives have barred.

Young Uighur men are discouraged from keeping beards and those who have them are stopped at checkpoints and questioned. So are women who wear Muslim headscarves and veils that obscure their faces.

Some public places such as hospitals bar such individuals from entering.

Earlier this month, the northern Xinjiang city of Karamay announced that young men with beards and women in burqas or hijabs would not be allowed on public buses.

In the city of Aksu, Ma Yanfeng, the director of the city's foreign propaganda office, said the government was concerned that Uighurs were being unduly influenced by radical Islamic forces from overseas.

“It's because they have been incited by others to do so,” said Ma, noting that traditional dress of Uighur women is multicolored. “Those clothes that are all black are a sign of influence from foreigners like in Turkey and have to do with extremist thinking."

Unlike in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or parts of South Asia, veils and abayas are relatively new to Uighurs in Xinjiang, only growing in popularity in recent decades, scholars say. Uighur historically have used “ikat” textiles with bold patterns and brilliant colors, an aesthetic they share with Uzbeks, Tajiks and other Central Asian cultures. Contemporary Uighur women, especially those in cities, dress like other urbanites though they aren't likely to bare a lot of skin.

Uighurs have been adopting veils and beards in a shift toward more pious lives, partly as symbolic resistance to Chinese rule and partly out of a desire for the egalitarianism associated with Islam to mend social inequalities, said Smith Finley, the Newcastle expert who has studied Uighurs since 1991.

Chinese authorities apparently make little distinction between these expressions of piety and the kind of extremism that poses a threat to society. In May, police in the county of Luntai raided women's dress shops and confiscated jilbabs. A photo on the local government's website showed four male police officers at a shop examining textiles while a woman in a black jilbab, likely a shop assistant or owner, stood in the background watching.

The rubber-stamp legislature in the southern prefecture of Turpan says on its website it is considering a law to impose fines of up to 500 yuan ($80) for wearing veils and cloaks in public.

The legislature says the law would help safeguard social stability, cultural security and gender equality and even protect health because, the proposal says, burqas deprive skin of sunlight and can cause heatstroke in summer. Elsewhere, officials have been rounding up dozens of Uighur women to attend indoctrination sessions and to trade their jilbabs and veils for traditional Uighur silk dresses.

“After today's ideological education, I now understand that the jilbab is not our ethnic group's traditional attire, and I recognize that veils and wearing jilbabs is incompatible with Islamic culture and is a backward and bad practice,” a woman named Ayiguli Bake was quoted by a local party-run newspaper as saying in a scripted fashion.

But on the streets of Kuqa and Aksu, many women could be seen wearing headscarves that covered their necks, though black cloaks were nowhere in sight and in most instances only elderly men had beards.Chinese officials probably are targeting outward manifestations of piety because they cannot “fundamentally alter people's inner states,” said Gardner Bovingdon, a Xinjiang expert at Indiana University.

"I can't make you stop admiring a more rigorous, scriptural Islam, but I can make you shave off that beard, I can make you take off that scarf,” Bovingdon said. “So that's what I'll do."

The authorities' heavy hand has reportedly sparked protests. In the rural town of Alaqagha, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Kuqa, police fired into a crowd in May when villagers violently protested the detention of women and girls for wearing headscarves and Islamic robes, according to the US government-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia.

On a recent evening in Alaqagha, rows of surveillance cameras perched atop street lights watched residents breaking their fasts at a small outdoor market. Pistol-carrying police who were trailing Associated Press journalists kept an eye on the villagers, who included women with headscarves shopping at donkey-drawn fruit carts.

“It's the state's way of saying 'we don't trust you, we see your religion as being something that's inherently of concern to us,'“ said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

"We are going to treat it as fundamentally problematic behavior, not as the basic right that it is.“

^ Peregrine ji, DAWN reports about the plight of the Muslims in East Turkestan and yet we do not hear voices of 'Islam khatrey mein hain' from the Believers in the Fortress of Islam, the only Islamic country in the world founded on Islam and the only Islamic country to have given the Islamic civilization the nuclear bomb. I thought that the martial-race Pakistani Army was tasked to protect the Frontiers of Islamic Ideology as well as the the geographical boundaries of the 'Land of Milk & Honey' against evil kafir Hindus. And, yet this deafening silence from them and their sword arm, the LeT does spoil the reputation of the usually frothing-at-the-mouth-corners momin, doesn't it?

Many thanks for your comments. All one can say is that Pakistan is the Lap Dog of the Running Imperialist Chinese Dogs.

Pakistan cannot and will not say anything against the Chinese. In fact the WHOLE UMMAH have not raised their voices against China – especially in the OIC which has Fifty and More Member Islamic Countries - in the prosecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. IMO the Chinese have got their heel on the Jugular of Pakistan and the "Influential" Countries of the 50 and more members of the OIC.

BEIJING: China reportedly executed eight people for “terrorist attacks” in the violence-wracked northwestern region of Xinjiang, state media said Saturday, with one or more of the condemned convicted for a suicide car crash at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The announcement by the official Xinhua news agency said the eight were involved in five different cases connected to Xinjiang, where Beijing says separatist militants are behind a string of attacks that have rocked China in recent months.

Xinhua said one of the cases included “the terrorist attack in the Tiananmen Square in Beijing”, a reference to a brazen assault last October in the heart of the capital in which a car rammed into people on the iconic square before bursting into flames.

Two tourists were killed alongside the three attackers in an attack that Beijing blamed on Xinjiang separatists.

The Xinhua report did not state how many of the eight executed were convicted in connection with the Tiananmen attack.

The other cases cited included convictions for establishing a terrorist organisation, attacks on police and officials and the manufacture of explosives.The latest executions underscore the tough approach authorities are taking to increasingly brazen and violent incidents.

The Tiananmen attack was one of several that have rocked China since last year, and which Beijing has blamed on Xinjiang separatists.

The far-western region is the resource-rich homeland of the Uighurs and other groups, and periodically sees ethnic tensions and discontent with the government burst into violence.

In March a horrific knife assault at a railway station in the southern city of Kunming left 29 dead and 143 wounded.

Two months later 39 people were killed, along with four attackers, and more than 90 wounded when assailants threw explosives and ploughed two off-road vehicles through a crowd at an Urumqi market.

Chinese courts, which are controlled by the ruling Communist Party and have a near-perfect conviction rate, frequently impose death sentences for terrorism offences.

The executions and sentencings are part of a crackdown that comes after Beijing vowed a year-long campaign against terrorism in the wake of the Urumqi market attack.

In June, 13 people were executed for Xinjiang linked terrorist attacks.

Beijing does not say how many people it executes each year. But independent estimates put the total around 3,000 in 2012, a figure higher than all other countries combined.

Exile groups say cultural oppression and intrusive security measures imposed by the Chinese government are the main causes of tension, along with immigration by China’s Han ethnic majority, which they say has led to decades of discrimination and economic inequality.

Beijing, however, stresses ethnic harmony in Xinjiang and says the government has helped improve living standards and developed its economy.